


For the weekend

by breathedout



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Alcohol, Gen, Hawaiian vacation, Kailua Beach, M/M, Magic, Not a "how they met" fic but basically, Surfing, Unsafe combinations of, and, luck, luck magic, nascent friendship, the next thing over
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-12
Updated: 2019-02-12
Packaged: 2019-10-26 14:59:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17748068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathedout/pseuds/breathedout
Summary: "Okay dude," said Penny. "You're not getting me. I've never done that, I don't even know if it's possible, but even if Icoulddo it this poor idiot would be hitching a ride to somewhere completely fucking random, totally outside my control: almost guaranteed to be a disaster and also likeprobablylife-threatening, so—""Nice," Frankie said, looking around, his hand still on Penny's arm. "Buzz's. This is my favorite bar on O'ahu."





	For the weekend

**Author's Note:**

> OK let me just say up front that I'm not at all clear on all the ins and outs of how time-and-space shenanigans work on this show; nor do I really—how shall I put this?—care. I'm congenitally both terrible at, and apathetic about, tracking the mechanics of this kind of fantasy plot. Additionally, my partner and I are watching Season 4 as it comes out (first time for both of us) at the same time as we're watching the back catalog (her on her 4th rewatch, me for the first time). So I haven't even seen S3 or the back half of S2, and I get confused about what happened in S4 versus what happened in S2. Basically what I'm saying is that canon-compliance is neither my strength nor my interest here, so if I've done something that contradicts the show, please forgive me but don't like... tell me. I'm just in this for Penny getting a friend whose company he actually enjoys. Also I've been freezing for like four months and apparently it makes me nostalgic for chilling in Kailua with my fam.
> 
> Logically I suppose this is set some weekend in the vicinity of 1.3/1.4. Thanks (if "thanks" is the word I want (just kidding, it is)) to [greywash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash) for getting me into this business, and also for a brief pre-publication audiencing of this fic. <3 It's otherwise unbetaed because I just don't care.

That was the day when, you know, _all_ this shit, all this, whatever, not to even go _into_ it but it was too—Penny was just—he was going to get _away_ from magic for a few days. All right? Clear his head. Walk through a portal, take the fuckin' subway out to Queens, look up some people, maybe Cyn and Pedro and that crew, score like some Oxy and some edibles and spend the weekend stoned playing Mario Kart on Javier's Wii and _not even mentioning magic_ , ok. Pretending like magic did _not exist_. 

So of course he'd ended up here. Of course. Of course Pedro had been in a training, and Cyn was visiting her folks in the South, and Javier had apparently vanished off the face of the earth. Of course it had started to snow, and of course, of _course_ , because Penny's life was really that determined to be fucked up, when he'd knocked on the door of the only other person in his phone who lived in that borough, the overall chill dude and probable gaming station owner who had made Penny his fake ID in 2013 had taken like four minutes to call him on being—wait for it—a magician. 

_Conversation_ ensued; Penny shuddered. 

"Huh," Frankie said. "So you can go, like. Anywhere you want? How does it work?"

"Yeah, _in theory_ ," Penny said. "In practice I meditate really hard on the Krispy Kreme in Tampa and end up halfway down the Mariana Trench, getting stung to death by some freaky jellyfish." 

Frankie chewed on his cupcake, thoughtfully. Outside, the snow came down thicker than before.

"Or a concrete office block in the Ukraine," Penny went on, trying to make some impression. "Or right under the knife of like an Iron Chef contestant who's in the middle of chopping up some celery."

"Can you take other people along?" 

"Okay dude," said Penny. "You're not getting me. I've never done that, I don't even know if it's possible, but even if I _could_ do it this poor idiot would be hitching a ride to somewhere completely fucking random, totally outside of my control: almost guaranteed to be a disaster and also like _probably_ life-threatening, so—"

"Nice," Frankie said, looking around, his hand still on Penny's arm. "Buzz's. This is my favorite bar on O'ahu."

Penny fumed for quite a while. He kept it up while Frankie clapped him on the back and pushed him through the entrance to the patio, shepherded him past the dried puffer fish and the glass floats in macraméd holders, sat him down at the prime table, which had just been freed up: beach view; light and balmy breeze; sheltered by a tree growing picturesquely up from the floor through the roof. Frankie patted him on the shoulder and trundled off toward the bar, where a guy with a beer belly and a backwards baseball cap was breaking into the widest smile Penny had ever seen, yelling in greeting, holding out his arms like Frankie was holding out his: because right. Yeah. 

How does somebody just _do_ something like that, Penny thought, watching the bartender pull Frankie into a one-armed hug. What the fuck. And all this, this having friends everywhere and everybody loving him and man-hugging him or whatever, was probably like. Some kind of _display_ or—so he looked away from Frankie Show, out at the road and the shower-off-the-white-sand area beyond it and then to the extremely goddamn blue water of the bay. As it was a perfect fucking seventy-five degrees, Penny had to get up to take his coat off, and his scarf, and then sat back down, thinking: _fucking_ Frankie. 

Frankie who was now coming back to the table, balancing a tray loaded with what looked like one of every drink the place offered. All that and a thing of olives, Penny thought: go big or go home. As Frankie passed the big center table, a toddler in a high chair flailed its arms up, screeching: a plastic dinosaur flew through the air straight at the tray. Frankie didn't even try to stop it: just stood there, the idiot, watching T-Rex coming at him, watching it collide with a pink drink that half-knocked over into a blue drink, liquid from both of them slopping over the sides of their glasses and, in the half-second Penny had to look forward to the alcoholic tsunami about to crash down on the heads of the people at the long table, the two glasses rebounded against each other, came to rest on their bases, and their spilled contents, combined, landed neatly in the little bowl meant for the olive pits. 

Frankie smiled down at the toddler, who stopped screaming; hiccuped; and smiled. 

"My buddy from way back," Frankie said, when he got back to the table. "Konane. He's comping us the drinks." 

"Dude," Penny said. It was half a comment on the number of drinks and half a comment on the narrowly-averted booze catastrophe, but also, he suddenly remembered, about _three hundred_ percent a comment on the shit Frankie had just pulled. "That was fucked up, okay," Penny told him. "You—we both could have died. In fact it's—it's just amazingly lucky we didn't die. I don't even know how we're doing to get back, you just—you can't _do_ that, shit, it's _insanely_ dangerous."

"Yeah," Frankie agreed. He slid a bright-yellow drink with an umbrella toward Penny. "But. It'll probably work out." 

Penny was—he was speechless. He literally had no words to put together into a comeback to that. He could only gesture, and gape, and make stupid gurgling noises at Frankie while Frankie picked up the little bowl meant for olive pits and took a sip of the slop that had landed in it, his expression thoughtful. The fucking breeze smelled like fucking plumeria; it was lovely.

"How," Penny said. He added, "What."

"This is delicious," Frankie told him, and then: "Hey Konane! You ever think of combining the pink thing and the blue thing? It's delicious!"

"Okay," Penny said, and broke his toothpick umbrella, and downed the yellow drink in two. 

Sometime after that, he did start feeling better. Konane came over with some clean glasses, and they spent a quality twenty minutes or so sampling various ratios of pink drink to blue drink. The purple franken-cocktail was undeniably better than either of the original two; Konane said they'd call them Frankie's Special when they put them on the menu. After Konane went back behind the bar he kept sending them over, and Penny and Frankie kept drinking them, and after a certain number of rounds it just got easier, you know, no way around it, to let Frankie off the hook for irresponsibly jump-starting Penny's whole Traveling thing, since it had gotten them to such a warm and pretty and also weirdly _friendly_ tropical paradise; and even if it didn't seem like Frankie'd exactly, whatever, _known_ they would turn up here, he at least seemed pretty confident it wasn't going to end with both their grisly deaths like Penny had definitely warned him it might, you know. Multiple times. So. 

It also got easier to sort of just _talk_ to Frankie. Penny realized he didn't really have anyone that he could talk to in his Brakebills life who wasn't all wrapped up in how things turned out. Frankie didn't seem wrapped up in anything, particularly; and what with the magical tropical drinks and the sunset that was starting to make everything on the patio all rosy and golden; and especially after the thing with that beautiful kid who'd been coming back from the bathroom:

"Do I _know_ you from somewhere?" he'd asked, pausing by Frankie's chair with his hip cocked and his hand light on Frankie's shoulder and his whole chiseled dancerly _thing_ going on, " _I'm_ Hiroki"; and Frankie just looked up at him and said, "Not that I know of," bland as beige, meeting dude's eyes for a grand total of like one point two seconds before he looked away.

"I'm pretty sure I saw that guy in a Calvin Klein ad," Penny said, half-choking, after Hiroki swanned off. "Do you–I mean, _I_ don't even _really_ swing that way, but I'd—"

"Yeah, he's fine." Frankie waved a hand. "Don't worry about it," he said, and clinked his purple drink with Penny's purple drink; and anyway sometime after that Penny found himself telling Frankie all about—well, more than he probably should have: the Beast and Julia and how everyone he met seemed to know _exactly_ what Penny should do with his Traveling, you know, jump around the world or lock himself down with some tattoo or sit around on a—fucking _lanai_ or whatever this was, drinking purple unicorn drinks and—

"Oh," said the woman at the next table, "no, we—none of this is what we ordered." The waiter, both arms full of surf n' turf, turned to go back to the kitchen. 

"I love lobster," Frankie observed, tranquil as a goddamn mountain lake; and then they had a free dinner on top of the drinks. 

It'd come just at the right time, too. Turned out Penny was starving, and the steak soaked up some of the booze; brought him back from the edge of woozy to where everything was just, it was good, you know. It was really good. The thing was, it just such a beautiful goddamn place. And, and here they were. And it was just so _wild_ , like what were they even _doing_ here in _Hawai'i_ , when that morning he'd woken up in upstate New York, well, for some value of "upstate New York," and now, what were they, you know, _doing_ —

"I dunno," Frankie said. "What do you feel like, man? Take a walk on the beach? Try out that little, uh, hopping trick of yours again? Or—okay," laughing, hand on Penny's hand at the sight of his face, "that's cool, there's plenty of shit to do right here. Get a lift into Honolulu, or, whatever. Obama went to grade school right up that hill."

"It's uh. Nine at night on a Saturday."

"Yeah," Frankie agreed. "You want to see it?"

"You've got, what, a pass-key, or—I. Ah. You know what," Penny said. He looked from the purple drinks, to the beach, to the remains of the lobster, and squinted, head to the side, as something… slotted into place. "Yes, Frankie," he said. "I would love to go see Obama's grade school."

So they stumbled out of Buzz's, arms around each other's shoulders. They'd barely crossed the road before a car slowed to ask if they needed a lift; Penny, with a weird snowballing kind of exhilarated _hilarity_ , whooped at the sky. Frankie accepted the man's offer, politely but without surprise, and Penny laughed harder, and "What?" Frankie said, smiling, looking over at him doubled up in the passenger's seat, but all Penny could do was wheeze. 

"Don't puke on my upholstery," the driver said. 

"Oh I won't," Penny said, getting himself together enough to choke out, "tonight's your lucky night, mister," before seizing back into laughter, tears rolling down his cheeks. He couldn't remember the last time he'd laughed like that. 

The driver dropped them off at a pretty standard-issue elementary school. It had fence around it, and the doors were locked, but as they pulled up a woman was walking toward them from the other direction, a sun-roughened bottle blonde in her 60s with a loud, magenta-floral halter top and a ring of keys. 

The blonde's name was Gilly. Her janitor job only went Monday through Thursday, "But I think I left my reading glasses," she told them. "It's driving me crazy; I had to come back to look."

"Lucky for us!" Penny said. He must still have sounded kind of hysterical because Frankie shot him an amused side-eye when Gilly turned to unlock the door to the gym. As she rooted around in the little break room across from the stairs—"They've really _gotta_ be here," calling out to them, "even my wife can't find 'em and she's a wizard at that kind of thing"—Penny and Frankie walked around the gym, the night air still wafting in through the door. 

"So. Tiny Obama played ball here," Penny said. 

"Must have," Frankie said. "Looks they've got like, rope-climbing, too. Tiny Obama probably climbed the ropes. Did push-ups."

"Dodgeball!" Penny said, and Frankie laughed.

"I wonder if they had those little scooter things," he said. "You know, the little platforms with wheels, and you zipped around on your belly."

"Oh shit," Penny said. "Tiny Obama would've been a _demon_ on one of those things."

"I'd better," said Frankie, and gestured toward the room where Gilly was still rooting through drawers, occasionally swearing. Penny leaned against the mats hung on the wall and watched the show: Frankie put his arm up against the doorway and his hip jostled somebody's plastic inbox on the desk, which fell to the ground and—

" _There_ they are!" Gilly said. "They must've fallen behind that plastic thing. So lucky you came over!"

Super lucky, Penny thought, grinning. 

Gilly took them on a little tour of the school. It was kind of nice, wandering around the deserted, open-air courtyard with all its mini-sized drinking fountains and mini-sized benches, just keeping their buzz going with nips off Gilly's hip flask, coincidentally full of Frankie's favorite rum. Gilly'd been a student here herself. In atomic bomb drills, she told them, all the kids had filed out of their classrooms into the open air, and crouched against the building with their hands over their heads. 

"I mean I guess it didn't much matter whether we were inside a cinder-block building or outside it," Gilly said, laughing; and Penny thought how, fucked-up as Brakebills was, school had always been an absurd and dangerous undertaking, honestly. Things could be worse than standing around mostly-drunk with Frankie and Gilly, amazed anyone made it to adulthood at all. Well: it was no mystery how Frankie had made it. But. The rest of them. 

Gilly gave them a lift back into town, later, and Frankie and Penny ended up down on the beach, shoes off, walking through the surf, waiting for the next amazing thing to happen. Penny was thinking about Frankie saying _I'd better_ ; about Frankie listening as Penny poured out his drunken heart about bullshit Brakebills drama. He was a _good guy_ , Penny was realizing. There was no law saying he had to find some middle-aged lesbian's reading glasses for her, but here they were. 

"So how do you know the island well enough to have a favorite bar here?" Penny asked. "Did you, what, win an all-expenses-paid month of Hawaiian bar-hopping, or?"

Frankie snorted. "Nah," he said. "House-sitting for friends of my parents. They've got a big place overlooking Kāneʻohe Bay. Landscaped grounds. They rent it out to magazines and shit. Disney did a commercial there." 

"No shit?" Penny said. "Sweet gig."

"It was," Frankie said. "That wasn't even really _luck_ , or—I guess it's hard to argue it wasn't lucky, but. Jerome and Amanda are more or less my godparents."

"Pretty lucky in your choice of godparents, then," Penny said, and Frankie laughed. 

"Yeah, for sure."

"It does make you wonder, like—how far back the luck goes. You know? I mean," with a sharp memory of—thirteen, fourteen, huddling under, whatever, you can't hide from what's in your own head—"were you always like this? Was your childhood, like," he laughed. "I can't imagine."

"It… has its issues," Frankie said. "For a while there things got kind of, you know. Out of control. Before I learned to channel it. But yeah I wonder that too. I mean. My folks are good people. We always had enough to eat. Was that _luck_ luck, or just." He gestured. "The kind of luck anyone could have." 

"You didn't try to figure it out?"

"Nah," Frankie said. "What could I do about it, either way?"

Yeah, Penny thought. What could you. He squeezed his toes into cool sand, and the warm water tickled his ankles. Not a lot, he thought. No use worrying about it. 

"Well," he said, swallowing. "This is sick, anyway. One of the only things I miss about Florida, the ocean where it's warm."

"Yeah?" Frankie said. 

"Surfing," Penny said; and Frankie said, again, "Yeah? Shit, man, we gotta get you a board!" and then they were off again: the quiet of the moment broken. 

Penny didn't fight it, this time. He whooped, that wild kind of out-of-control exhilaration ballooning up in him again, and ran after Frankie, who was striding down the beach toward a surf shack that was closed, obviously, it was at this point like one in the morning. He knocked on the painted plywood cover for the front of the stand, and "Just a minute!" came from inside it, and then the plywood shifted, and was removed, and—and Penny doubled over, laughing.

"Hey, man," said Frankie, totally unfazed. "I'm sorry, I forgot your name."

"Hiroki," Penny said, wiping away his tears. "Good to see you again."

Hiroki was, of course, not the owner of the surf shack, because that would be too simple a piece of luck for Frankie's whole over-the-top thing he had going on, and also Penny hadn't been wrong: Hiroki's gig was modeling. 

"The shack's my friend's," he told them, "but he's fighting with his girlfriend so I came down here to smoke a joint. And look who turned up: the cute bear from Buzz's."

"Hey," Frankie said, not even blushing, "my friend here wants to grab a board. But then: share the joint?" 

So Penny grabbed a board, and paddled it out into the surf, which was low and lazy and perfect for getting his surfing feet back under him after four hours of drinking and a few years in New York. He struck out a few times, let a few waves carry him back to shore; then just floated for a while, face-up in the salt water with ocean caressing the sides of his face. _Magical_ , he thought, not meaning anything by it; like a muggle would think it, doing what Penny was doing now; and it kind of cracked him up but it was kind of perfect, too. He wouldn't take it back. 

When he swam back up Frankie and Hiroki were stretched out on a beach blanket, finishing a second joint. "Come on!" he told them. "Water's great!" so the three of them stumbled back down to the water, splashing each other and laughing and floating out together to look at the stars. 

"You're kind of terrifying, you know that," Penny said, the next morning, waking up on the sofa back at Frankie's place in Queens with no memory of how they got back. Frankie must have second-hand Traveled them while Penny was asleep, which had apparently worked out fine, so. Thinking about it only petrified Penny slightly. Frankie was sitting up in bed looking at his phone, Hiroki still asleep next to him.

"He's gonna freak when he wakes up to snow," Penny said.

"Yeah," Frankie agreed. "But. It'll probably work out."

**Author's Note:**

> Multiple family members of mine grew up in Kailua but I didn't run this past any of them or otherwise geography- or history-check it as much as I normally do. So apologies if there are inaccuracies!


End file.
